Word: elme
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...boyhood home had tremendous elms," recalls John Hansel, 45, a New Jersey manufacturer of watercoolers. "Those trees were my symbols of the past." In fact, Hansel bought his present house in Riverside, Conn., mainly because four venerable elms shaded the front yard. Unfortunately, two of the trees soon died, victims of the Dutch elm disease that now kills about 1,000,000 trees a year in the U.S. Distraught, Hansel launched a personal crusade to save the threatened species. In 1965, unimpressed by the botanists who believed that the American elm was doomed, Hansel set up Elms Unlimited, which...
Hansel was not the first to mount a scientific assault on elm disease. Experts have long known that it is caused by a fungus, carried by the elm-bark beetle, that clogs the tree's circulatory system. But ever since the disease hit the U.S. in the early 1930s, every cure has failed. DDT may kill birds as well as the beetles; another pesticide named Bidrin sometimes destroys the trees. Frantic elm owners have resorted to such quack remedies as turpentine injections or driving galvanized nails into the trunks (in hopes that the zinc oxide will deter the fungus...
...telling exactly how he trains a sheep dog ("Once you have taught him stillness, you're getting somewhere"). An orchard foreman navigates his way through the niceties of pruning apple trees. A wheelwright remembers how he used to build wagons ("For making the hubs we always chose wych-elm") and paint them ("The blue rode well in the corn"). The village veterinarian, a sensitive man, contemplates the tortuous ethics of "factory farms," where pigs and chickens are raised assembly style. Wrinkling his brow over incipient inbred cannibalism, he observes darkly: "Tail biting among pigs is becoming a quite incredibly...
...years. But Brookfield School remains a tranquil antechamber to gentlemanhood, where the master now reigns in the person of Peter O'Toole. Discarding the shy, dry Donat approach, O'Toole becomes his own man, a conflicted figure changing imperceptibly from instructor to institution, like an elm turning, cell by cell, into petrified rock. The result is one of the slyest and subtlest performances in his career...
Like many other retired executives, Bonanno finds the routine irksome. Most mornings Hill drives him into town, where Bonanno attends to errands until about noon. Returning home-a rather small, three-bedroom house at 1847 East Elm Street-he usually lunches on an Italian sausage sandwich, then puts on a "ghastly-looking" pair of Bermudas for a couple of hours of sun and reading in the yard...